Burgez is dead: here's why Italy's most irreverent fast food restaurant is in crisis

Burgez, born to be the villain of Italian fast food, has made irreverence his core business. “Eating Burgez is seriously harmful to your health”, “Does it disgust you? Good, it means it's ours”. Some people laughed, many people argued, but everyone talked.

Burgez was born in 2015 from a mystical (and somewhat fictional) illumination between the founder Simone Ciarruffoli and a homeless man in New York. From there the sandwich “ smashes ”, the communication is viral and the brand expands. Milan, Rome, Bologna: locations everywhere, to the point of invoicing almost 12 million euros in 2022, but with a loss of € -2,401,442. Burgez did not teach irreverent marketing . Let's say he never went to school. He played at being a rebel, a sandwich nerd, the one who sells you a cheeseburger and even makes fun of you. And as long as you're little, it works.

You are the burger bully who challenges McDonald's with meme hits and avalanches of sauces. But then you grow. You become a leader in your niche (smash burger in Italy) and from then on you can no longer just do outsider marketing. Burgez did not understand the change of phase: from launch to maintenance. He continued to do guerrilla marketing, to create controversy and to gain visibility. Fake complaints of exploitation inside the sandwich bags? Controversy. T-shirts on the "real doggy style" for women's day? Controversy.

Provocation as the only language works and I like it, but when it becomes a system, it becomes noise. And with noise no one can communicate anymore and a relationship is not created. On social media , brands become people, and if values ​​are not shared, if battles are not espoused, a relationship with users is not created. We can attract attention by making a lot of noise and we can make ourselves known to many users by going viral, but only sharing ideals creates a bond.

Burgez has also been described in recent years as a social success , but if we consider the number of current followers: 94,894 and the average engagement rate developed, 0.05% (metric that measures how much an audience interacts with the contents of a social profile), and an average of 43 likes per post, we understand that they are all users who know the brand, but are not in relation with it, are not involved and perhaps never have been. They were just impressed.